A few months ago I posted my thoughts after reading through Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. My conclusion was that while I thought the books improved greatly in quality as the series progressed, and I found them harmless and entertaining and engaging in a pop culture kind of way, I would not let Kate read them if she were, say, 14 right now. In the last couple of days I have come across two articles that articulate why I feel that way a lot better than I could, and I wanted to link them here.

The first is from Wired magazine, which manages to make a surprising number of very astute points in pulling apart what's disturbing about the Edward and Bella love story in their article "The Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight."

The second is from Credenda Agenda, where Doug Wilson is blogging his way through the first book. That's a pretty funny proposition to begin with, so I've been following that series. I'm not always Wilson's biggest fan, but I think he's right about why this is not the ideal love story. Particularly this bit:

"Any pain is preferable to the pain of having the destructive male gone. Got that? You can think up a lie to tell the nurses at the ER when you go down there to have that black eye looked at. There has to be another option to quickly skip on to, right?"

And now back to my regularly scheduled programming of photos of my kid.